For your small business, do you need broadband? Here is a comprehensive guide to assist you in making the best decision.
Being connected is a crucial prerequisite for any business, whether you're a startup or an established organisation. Having a quick, reliable connection to the outside world is necessary whether you're a digital designer or an artisan brewer.
To mention a few uses of broadband, you require it to keep up with emails, utilise social media, manage your website, send orders, or use cloud services.
Choosing a business internet is not the same as choosing a home internet. Business needs differ from where you would go for the lowest price, quickest speed, and most generous data caps.
Why having reliable business broadband is crucial
The main selling point for most business broadband plans is speed. More importance should be placed on a business connection's dependability, customer satisfaction, SLAs, traffic prioritisation and security.
Even if losing internet access could affect your business, it's still frustrating when your home broadband goes out. No connectivity, no internet access, no VoIP, no cloud services, no emails, and no cloud backups. Without that, even the smallest firm won't last very long!
There are many businesses that will take your business if you can't reach them, can't respond to emails or purchase requests right away, or is otherwise unreachable. Reliability is crucial because of this.
Deals for business versus home broadband
Home broadband mostly revolves around speed, cost, and data limits. Additionally, we must deal with traffic control, the infamous "up to" promises, and frequently insufficient customer service.
If you're a light user who only wants help between the hours of 8 am and 6 pm, you're good to go, but since businesses need to be online, residential broadband is insufficient.
There are five good reasons to choose business broadband
Businesses should invest in business internet rather than home broadband for the following five convincing reasons.
1. Dependability
Although vendor dependence on reliability may exist, a commercial broadband connection will generally be better maintained, receive quicker maintenance, and receive priority fault response. Businesses generally earn better service than residential clients because they spend more.
2) Speed
In contrast to home internet, business broadband does not place the same premium on speed. The promise of being "up to" speed shouldn't be seen very frequently either.
Business broadband speeds are advertised with far greater accuracy, and the provider takes much greater care to ensure that it can actually offer those speeds. Business consumers are typically far more informed and much more inclined to voice their displeasure with slow internet speeds.
3. Customer service
Customer service for residential broadband is typically available on weekdays during the day. If you work those hours or don't mind spending a long time in a phone queue, that's acceptable.
Business customers typically receive devoted service from more qualified people, who can frequently address your problem on the spot. The extra expense is well worth it just for this less frustrating experience!
4) SLAs
Residential broadband service is typically provided with "best-effort" standards. This means that the provider must use all commercially reasonable efforts to guarantee that your service is dependable and to address any difficulties as soon as they arise. Unfortunately, not all suppliers agree with our concept of adequate.
Business broadband will have certain SLAs that spell out a maximum response time, an anticipated time for an engineer if one is required, and any compensation that is owed for outages. It's a far more understandable and responsive system than what home customers are used to.
5) Traffic control
Traffic is prioritised for business broadband subscribers above residential ones. Once more, the provider strives to supply more because corporate clients spend more and have higher expectations. Residential clients could be subject to traffic restrictions during rush hours or have certain traffic types, such as bit torrent, prohibited.
Business clients don't have these limitations, thus your transportation should arrive at its destination on time regardless of the time of day or the type of traffic.
Other crucial characteristics of corporate broadband
For startups and SMBs, corporate broadband has additional advantages over residential.
1) Fixed IP addresses
Having a static IP address is advantageous if you host your own website, utilise VoIP or video conferencing, employ cloud CCTV, remote desktop, remote backups, or other intensive web applications. With a static IP address, you may set up your programmes to optimise their use of your connection as opposed to utilising a dynamic IP that changes frequently.
2) Commercial tech support
Although we touched on better-skilled customer service before, this is significant enough to expand on. Residential customer support representatives are trained to handle straightforward jobs on the phone, but they are also taught how to raise calls with other teams for more complex issues.
Business customer support typically has the capacity to tackle more challenging jobs as well as a variety of issues, requests, and modifications.
3) Security
A few commercial broadband options include anti-virus, firewall, phishing, and hacking protection features, among other cyber security tools. They are frequently expensive, but if you don't have access to your own IT staff or support, they can provide additional security with no upkeep. However, you shouldn't rely on them as your only kind of defence.
4) Additional features
It's simple to forget that the majority of corporate broadband packages include a landline. Having a landline is a helpful backup even if you never use it and gives your clients another method to contact you. It's helpful to have, even if you only use it to send a number to your call centre or unified communications system.
VPNs, VoIP or HD video conferencing, cloud backup solutions, and call forwarding are additional nice-to-have features that can be included with business broadband.
Selecting the best broadband option
There are five main types of broadband technology available. Each has advantages and disadvantages and provides something unique.
1) ADSL
Your standard non-fibre internet connection is called an ADSL, or Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line. BT Openreach often offers it directly or through a reseller. If you're close to a telephone exchange, it uses the copper phone lines within a building and uses compression technology to deliver a respectable degree of speed.
2) FTTC fibre
Fibre to the cabinet, or FTTC, is a copper and fibre hybrid. From the provider network to your green street cabinet, it travels through fibre optic cable before travelling to your property via copper telephone cables. The vendor may upgrade their network without having to replace millions of miles of copper cable, making it a popular alternative. However, the last leg does cause a speed reduction.
3) FTTP fibre
A full-fibre connection is called FTTP, or fibre to the premises. When a provider runs fibre optic cable all the way into the building, this is mostly accessible in urban areas or new rural developments. Although it is only available in towns, cities, or new developments, this provides the fastest speeds. For additional details, refer to Broadband Genie's explanation of FTTC and FTTP connections.
4) Virgin Media fibre
Depending on where you are in the country, Virgin Media fibre employs either FTTC or FTTP technology. Coaxial connections, which are substantially quicker than BT's copper lines, are used for the final leg of Virgin's FTTC, which is an advantage. The limitation on availability to Virgin Media areas is a drawback.
5) 4G broadband
A broadband connection is offered by 4G broadband using the mobile network. This is frequently used as a fallback option for companies that cannot afford a fallback FTTC connection or for companies without a fast fixed-line connection, such as those in rural or non-cabled locations, that lack a fast fixed-line connection. Although it provides a workable substitute for fixed-line connections, it is frequently more expensive and frequently has data caps.
Rural areas with a business broadband
You probably already know all too well how slow fixed-line broadband can be if you operate a business outside of our towns and cities. Rural areas are not well served by broadband due to a mix of problems including distance from an exchange, lack of investment, low potential for a return on investment, and others.
However, you do have choices. Numerous rural towns across the US have access to connectivity alternatives thanks to developments like 4G broadband, satellite internet, community fibre networks, community wireless, and others.
Cybersecurity for business broadband
Security is crucial regardless of the size of your company since you need to protect it. The same safety measures that you would take at home must be scaled up for business. This calls for commercial firewalls, antivirus software, malware and phishing scanners, and backup programmes.
While your broadband provider may offer some of them, it would also make sense to employ your own solutions.
For small to medium-sized organisations, options including business-class routers with built-in firewalls, Cisco AWS solutions, and cloud antivirus are all feasible choices. The objective of this game is defence in depth, therefore the more solid your defences are, the safer you are.
If you need help to migrate to VoIP PABX, call Simplyfree.
Simplyfree is based in Wellington, New Zealand and provides smart business phone solutions such as Fibre, Broadband, Toll-Free, 0800 numbers, Unified Communications, Conference Calls, Call waiting, Call queuing, Voicemail to email, call recording, video team meetings and more!
If you wish to install a business broadband solution, Simplyfree allows clients to tailor their phone solutions to include every cutting-edge function and configuration if they want to create a business broadband solution. Through our consultative sales process, we guarantee that any solution will include a variety of features and capabilities to improve the professionalism, dependability, and accessibility of your business communications.
Simplyfree is based in Wellington, New Zealand and provides smart business phone solutions such as Fibre, Broadband, Toll-Free, 0800 numbers, Unified Communications, Conference Calls, Call waiting, Call queuing, Voicemail to email, call recording, video team meetings and more!
Call Simplyfree today!